TC Electronic Plethora X5 Toneprint Pedalboard

This apparently wasn’t ready for NAMM, and it still isn’t shipping, but it looks interesting. A highly-flexible pedal board with simple controls, Plethora X5 allows you to create and customize up to 127 custom boards with a up to five Toneprint pedals each. Effects include: Hall Of Fame 2 Reverb, Flashback 2 Delay, Sub n Up Octaver, Brainwaves Pitch Shifter, Corona Chorus, Hypergravity Compressor, Mimiq Doubler, Vortex Flanger, Pipeline Tap Tremolo, Quintessence Harmony, Sentry Noise Gate, Shaker Vibrato. Shnobel does a great job of explaining it, or check out the shorter official rundown below. It will be available later this year for $399.

You can store up to 75 Toneprints per effect in the hardware for easy recall. MASH technology turns all five footswitches into expression controllers with customizable mapping and is added to legacy pedals. The footswitches can be also be converted to tap tempo.

You can insert an external effects loop anywhere in the chain and assign it to one of the footswitches if you want to save its on/off status with your pedalboard patches. You can also use the loop to connect Plethora X5 to your amp via the 4-cable method [some effects going in the front, some in the amp’s effects loop].

Included is a UniTune chromatic tuner, and a global speaker cab-sim for direct play with audio interface and PA systems.

An EXP input lets you assign an external expression pedal to control parameters or use as a volume pedal anywhere in the signal chain.

Three knob control over each pedal makes for fast tweaking, while the Quick Swap feature lets you instantly reorganize your signal chain.

Plethora automatically saves your settings as you go.

MIDI IN allows you to select saved boards from external MIDI controllers.

Full stereo I/O with low noise and high levels of headroom.

Bluetooth allows you to use the free Toneprint App to import any of the vast library of Toneprints, edit effects parameters, design custom Toneprints, and organize boards quickly. Regular firmware updates will include new boards, new pedals, new Tonerints and more.

For those for whom five effects at a time are enough, the Plethora seems like a solution to custom tailoring the effects to the gig, perfect for fly dates as a sideman in various bands. I can also see this used like many employ the Line 6 M Series pedals: in conjunction with the much-used boutique pedals on a board to supply some effects used more sparingly.

 

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